Built and designed for Hankook Tire Ltd, Hankook Technodome is a state-of-the-art facility located in the heart of Asia’s ‘silicon valley’ in Daejeon, South Korea. Completed by Foster+Partners in 2016 with 92,763m² of the total area, the architectural vision of this project is to create a contemporary, sleek, and mysterious building with an awesome floating silver roof.
Goal
The centerpiece of this awesome building is the research laboratories and tire testing that display to invite staff and visit0rs to reinforce the core identity of Hankook. The aim of this 98,000-square-metre facility is to attract the industry’s top talent and also provide a perfect place to work with dynamic social spaces, advanced laboratories. and light-filled offices. This way emphasizes informal interaction within the workplace with central meeting pods.
Design
The existing buildings’ analysis can provide an insight int9 the spaces of testing. One-third of the laboratories require pits of isolation so they have to be located on the ground floor of the building while the rest need to be located in double-height areas to accommodate equipment neatly. This building is also arranged as five fingers with industrial units and a parallel office.
In order to create a dynamic, integrated plan that promotes visual connections between different areas, the building arrangement is very flexible to enable the changes in use in the future. There are also breaks between each finger that draw warm daylight into the heart of the floor plate while the levels step up from four to seven storeys defined as a response to the eight restrictions imposed by the adjacent government site in Daejeon.
Details
The spaces of research can be found along the top-lit central spine that runs from the restaurant and entrance of the building in the south to the staff accommodation to the north. Suspended above the full-height space, the glazed oval meeting pods draw daylight through the building smoothly. A natural divide between more sensitive product development zones and public areas can be created thanks to the circulation strategy.
This strategy also allows visitors to follow a tour through the building from the spectacular lobby that used as an exhibition space for the latest product range with views into the testing areas along the spine to the parkland outside. All different functions in this building are unified beneath the bold gesture of a wide silver roof canopy that attracts everyone’s attention who sees it.
Hankook Technodome Gallery
Photography: Foster+Partners